1: Which 3D rendering program (preferably a raytracer), renders 3 dimensional voxel data I have created externally (perhaps from a text file) ? At minimum, it would be converting 2 color data (i.e. the voxel either exists or it doesn't), but preferably, also optionally taking into account the 'colour' of the voxel.
another forum member, don casteel, started writing a program which does this (and voxelises 3d flame fractals) but i think he's given it up now that he's into working with sunflow (a really nice opensource java ray tracer).
certainly there are others (none spring to mind right now), and i plan to write my own volume rendering code soon; in fact, here's a preliminary render using homogeneous (constant/nonvarying) fog:
2: Even more advanced, is there a 3d program which 'looks' for surfaces in the 3D voxel data, and converts these to surface polygons (or for programs like povray, mathematical curves). It would be the equivalent of a 2D structured drawing program tracing the outline of a shape in a bitmap picture. Once again, I'm thinking of the 3D program being able to read my external data, such as ascii data created from a C program. I'm hoping for something a little more advanced than the marching squares (or cubes) algorithm which only allows for 45 degree jumps of lines or polygons.
the marching cubes algorithm is pretty much the standard method to do this; your best bet would be to modify such code to implement the angle constraints you want.
